Today we welcome VMware vSphere 4 into the world

In case you missed it (though I highly doubt that is humanly possible), VMware announced this morning that it has shipped its long-awaited, much talked-about, next-generation virtualization platform, vSphere 4. And it’s done so ahead of previously discussed schedules, with a self-imposed deadline still some 40 days away.

It seems like forever ago when VMware first started talking about its new “virtual datacenter OS.” In fact, the new VDC-OS discussion started last September in Las Vegas, at the VMworld 2008 event. Three months later in December, the news broke about the name change to vSphere; finally last month, the company announced vSphere’s coming-out party would be before the end of Q2 at a gala event taking place at VMware’s headquarters.

Now, the software is ready and available on VMware’s Web site for purchase and download. Starting today, customers can order any of the six different versions of vSphere available, ranging from Essentials for a small shop to Enterprise Plus for the largest of datacenters. And pricing ranges from $166 per processor up to $3,495.

“With VMware vSphere 4, we are once again raising the bar significantly for businesses that desire to dramatically improve IT performance,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manage of the server business unit at VMware.  “The cost savings associated with virtualization are undeniable, and as more customers standardize on VMware to drive 100 percent virtualization, they are realizing the additional benefits that our solutions deliver, including increased flexibility and agility.”

VMware said that vSphere 4 extends the previous generation VMware platform, VMware Infrastructure 3, along three dimensions: It delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business-critical applications in large-scale environments; it provides uncompromised control over application security and service levels; and it preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture, and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting. From a cost savings perspective, VMware said its new platform will provide customers a 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, 50 percent storage savings, and 20 percent additional power savings within their datacenters.

VMware raises the bar with new features such as VMware Fault Tolerance, where it creates a live replica of an application on a different server in the event of failure. Or the new thin provisioning concept, which allows customers to use less physical disk space for virtual machine consumption, saving on a growing set of storage costs.  And it also adds better Distributed Power Management, helping to consolidate virtual machines onto fewer physical host servers during periods of low usage. And if you need more features than that, VMware will be happy to tell you about them.

Need help finding out more information?  Check out these resources:

• Want a great and simple chart that helps compare vSphere 4 and VI3 product offerings?
• Get up to speed by downloading the latest information from VMware’s updated documentation section.
• Find out more information on the upgrade process to VMware vSphere 4.

And if you want to find out more, just type in “vsphere” to VMware’s Knowledge Base to access a host of new documents covering their latest virtualization platform.